This article claims that 150 million web pages and 1 billion customer interactions, amounting to 5TB of data, are processed every night by this company you've never heard of (unless you have), BloomReach. Apparently online retailers under pressure from Amazon and it's effective big data recommendation systems are willing to feed their data into BloomReach to get their own recommendation systems. The system customizes landing pages, search results, recommendations sections on a site, and promotions.﻿

A computer’s ability to accurately classify objects in images is a fundamental research focus in computer vision. Current methods of classification typically adopt a multiclass method, in which a detected object in an image is assigned a label from amongst a set of mutually exclusive labels. However, this does not capture the complexity of objects in the real world; For example, “husky”, “dog”, and “puppy” are not mutually exclusive, but while “husky” is automatically a “dog”, it may or may not be a “puppy”.

Using prior knowledge about semantic label relations, the HEX graph formalism allows a “flexible specification of relations between labels applied to the same object: (1) mutual exclusion (e.g. an object cannot be dog and cat), (2) overlapping (e.g. a husky may or may not be a puppy and vice versa), and (3) subsumption (e.g. all huskies are dogs)”, providing a unified classification framework that generalizes existing models.

This work will be presented at the 2014 European Conference in Computer Vision (ECCV ‘14, http://goo.gl/DSOfeC), hosted in Zurich, Switzerland, September 6-12. To learn more, read the full paper at http://goo.gl/1O6RqT.﻿

It's estimated that in the next decade the number of computer science jobs in the U.S. will outnumber qualified people by 1 million. That's 1 million jobs for the taking that Americans will miss out on because of inadequate skill sets....

Last week, at the IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN, http://goo.gl/KUSH7M), Google Software Engineer +Tushar Chandra gave a keynote address outlining the systems aspects of Sibyl, a supervised machine learning system that is used for solving a variety of prediction challenges, such as YouTube video recommendations.

To learn how Sibyl is being used at Google to solve internet-scale problems while using reasonable resources, watch the video below.﻿

Google finally wins the 8-year copyright battle to scan more than 20 million books from libraries and make them available for everyone. What a perfect balance of the rights of authors against broader interests of society! Common sense wins. Digitization can roll on. This is indeed a big deal!